Posts Tagged → delicious

Making it More Delicious

Explaining Delicious to non-techies just got a little easier.

The site can now be reached at the www.delicious.com address, much simpler than their previous del.icio.us URL.

[No, you don’t put a www in front of that; no there’s no .com at the end; and no, you don’t need http:// in any case!]

There’s more than just a change of address, however. The site now has a new, cleaner look that should also help newbies with navigation.

Today’s post on the Delicious blog explains the changes and includes a video that illustrates the visible part of the face lift.

Antiquated Bookmarking

In his regular Thursday feature, Post tech columnist Rob Pegoraro does a first-look review of Firefox 3.

After a couple of days using the new version of the already excellent browser, I’m pretty happy with the increased speed and the fact that it doesn’t seem to choke on certain sites nearly as much as it used to.

I suppose the new security features are nice, although I’ve never had any trouble steering away from suspicious sites.

However, there’s one item in the Firefox feature set highlighted by Pegoraro that puzzles me.

If, however, you’re a bookmark-tending type, Firefox 3 can help you make more sense of your Web favorites. You can tag them for easier reference, then sort through to see which ones you visit most and which ones collect dust.

Bookmarks? Saving a list of sites to a single computer really doesn’t make much sense anymore.

But having enough of them that you’d need to tag them for “easier reference” indicates that local bookmarking is probably the wrong tool for the job.

Especially if you consider that there are plenty of reliable web-based applications like del.icio.us that allow tagging, as well as sharing, and generally other do a much better job than any browser could.

Quick, Block Del.icio.us

I’m not a fan of internet filtering systems. At all!

Simply banning web sites doesn’t teach students anything about safely using the net and it excuses some educators from having to manage web access.

However, I do understand that filters are a political reality and that there is some material on the internet that needs to be blocked from student view.

But del.icio.us?

One high school in this area has added that seemingly benign utility to their blacklist because of how one student was using his account.

It seems he was posting recommended sites for his friends, some of which the school administration thought were instructionally inappropriate. Including new tools for bypassing the filtering system at the school.

So, we blame the technology and ban it instead of acknowledging that this student has a much better idea of just how useful del.icio.us is than his teachers do.